Avatar

As you may or may not know (I'm tending to use this phrase a lot lately) I am a Rotten Tomatoes movie critic. So, it kind of makes sense that I am a movie freak.

I didn't always used to be. I used to hate movies. I hated how loud they were, I thought they were scary, etc. I think most of the problem was that when I was a child, I was taken to wach lots of cartoons and animations, and my crazy child imagination got lost into them and I lost grip of what was real, what was happening, and what was just on the screen. The first live-action movie I watched, The Princess Diaries, was a breakaway from my traumatising experiences trying to watch animated movies.

So I have always hated animated movies. Part of it is that I think a lot of directors get lost in the visual aspect of a animated movie that they lose any sense of realism, any storyline, any themes - it's just fancy eye-candy.

But lately, I have started to overcome my prejudice against animated movies. I watched Ratatouille and enjoyed it immensely, and now I am dying, dying to watch Avatar.

When Avatar came out I wasn't really motivated to watch it, and even though my mother and sister watched it on the plane when we went to China I refused. I thought it was silly. I had only heard a little about it, and I didn't really know much about it, but I thought it was a silly idea, something designed for computer game nerds. I never really considered taking the time to go watch it.

That changed when we went to Harvey Norman and I went into the Home Theatre display there, where they had this amazing new LED screen showing a blu-ray of Avatar. Have any of you seen a blu-ray on LED? It's amazing.

But watching those few minutes of Avatar changed my mind about it. It wasn't so much about the visuals, which were mind-blowingly impressive, but I go against the general consensus that it doesn't have much of a storyline - because, perhaps it doesn't, but there are themes in there, that are perhaps drowned in the visuals, but are powerful and relevant themes nonetheless - this is my training as a philosophy student coming through, here. Like Spirited Away's cryptic warnings about pollution and human's greed and environmental impact, Avatar is also a very powerful warning against mankind's constant tendancy to invade, to take what is not ours and claim it for ourselves, not thinking or caring about who was there first. As Eddie Izzard said 'We've conquered the world with a cunning use of flags. And we back it up with guns.'

It's often amazed me how petty the world has become, but what has always amazed me is how greedy, selfish and uncaring we have always been. As Agent Smith said in The Matrix, we are not really mammals - all other mammals adapt to where they live, but humans make where we live adapt to us, and when we have destroyed everything, we move on. He also says, quite accurately, that we are 'a plague, a cancer, a virus on this world'...and as much as I love Neo and as much as I hate Smith, you can't deny that that is true.